As lawmakers – on both sides of the aisle – work on revamping No Child Left Behind, it is evident there will be a departure from much of what the law established. This retreat from requirements like annual yearly progress in reading and math, the highly qualified teacher provisions and school improvement strategies acknowledge their lack of positive impact on student learning or on improving equity among schools.

On the flipside, it looks like Congress will carry policies like the disaggregation of student achievement data and annual standardized testing in at least reading and math into the eventual reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). These policies have provided some useful information.

While NCLB did shine a brighter light on the achievement gap and inequities many in the education field already knew existed, it did not really provide a good way to fix the problems.

I think the big lesson from No Child Left Behind is how important it is to find the right balance between federal mandates and state and local decision-making.

The federal government should set the goals and expectations for student learning and monitor and make public whether those goals are met or not. States and school districts should be allowed more flexibility on how to attain those goals and expectations.

The federal government should hold states and school districts accountable for equitable funding of schools, including the equitable distribution of teachers and leaders.

The federal government should continue to conduct and share research on and promote innovation for promising practices to improve schools (PreK-12) and student learning. And the federal government should provide financial incentives and technical assistance to states and school districts seeking to adopt or scale up promising practices.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a catalyst for putting the nation’s focus on student achievement, and it has contributed to a dynamic of more intense attention on raising the bar for student learning. The disaggregated data provision was a seminal development that, thankfully, we have executed with some fidelity. Implementation of the law has had little influence on the gaps in achievement for target population groups. The June report from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, summed up the current situation: “These data paint a portrait of a sad truth in America’s schools. The promise of fundamental fairness hasn’t reached whole groups of students that will need the opportunity to succeed.” This report notes the two most frequent inequities encountered by students from low-income families are access to challenging course work and access to experienced teachers. Why do we expect students in schools serving low-income communities to perform on par with students in more affluent communities when they are not given equal access to the two critical factors that most influence what they learn? How can we expect any law to accomplish its aims when we deliberately avoid implementation of key components? On this 10th anniversary of NCLB, we must acknowledge one simple truth: The provision that would have moved us toward closing the gap – ensuring that highly qualified teachers are equally distributed throughout both low and high-income community schools – was never even implemented. It was regulated to permit continued obfuscation at the state and local levels. The problem of attracting and retaining experienced teacher talent for schools in low-income communities was not addressed as a matter of equity and social justice.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) got it right when in January 2003, they wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Education about their concerns with the implementation of NCLB and its potential to weaken the reforms embodied in the law. In that letter, Rep. Miller and Sen. Kennedy said, “The Education Department permits states to define teachers who are only in the process of obtaining alternative certification as “highly qualified.” These regulations will perpetuate current practices under which teachers with no experience and no training are assigned to teach our most disadvantaged children.” Unfortunately, the Congress officially inserted this perverse regulation into the law in 2010, overturning a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision (Renee v. Duncan) that found this regulation to violate the statute. And, thus, the ultimate promise of NCLB has never been realized. After 10 years, children in those low-income communities are still paying the price.

Just ask Candice Johnson, a plaintiff in Renee v. Duncan, who recently wrote a letter asking why in her high school, did she not receive the same caliber of teachers that nearby Beverly Hills schools received. Or, look at the recent report by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the Center for American Progress that shows the vast disparity that still exists with distribution of teacher talent in each state.

One member of Congress has stood up to point this out and offer a solution. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has introduced S. 1716, the “Assuring Successful Students through Effective Teaching Act.” AACTE worked closely with Sen. Sander's office on the development of the bill, which aims to end the practice of congregating the least prepared teachers in the nation’s highest need schools.

While this is promising, no change will come until the States, the Congress and the Administration agree to support reform that is not through one-off, fly-by-night innovation projects that have yet to show evidence of efficacy. Instead, their support should be focused on the innovations and partnerships occurring in programs that are working diligently to get highly qualified, adequately prepared beginning teachers into the classrooms that need them most. The Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grants is one of the only federally supported programs that still exists where institutions of higher education are partnered with high-need school districts, training teacher candidates to know how to work effectively in those schools. These grantees have gone to members of Congress and the Administration and shown through stories, facts, and figures the impact that their work is making and what their teacher candidates are capable of because of the TQP grants. In return, the Administration seeks to consolidate the program and the recently released House Republican draft ESEA reauthorization bill eliminates the program altogether.

Likewise, we should be heralding the TEACH Grants as a solution. The TEACH Grants support high-performing recruits into preparation programs with a commitment to teach in high-need fields in high-need schools. As of May 2011, 647 TEACH Grant recipients had entered their service obligation, in such high-need areas as math, science, special education and bilingual education. Yet, this is another program whose funding is now in jeopardy.

If we know that skilled teachers can boost student achievement, then why do we not require a high bar for all new teachers? In the implementation of NCLB, why are we not investing in the programs that produce the vast majority of beginning teachers rather than promoting boutique and unproven innovations that will have minimal impact at best? Reform is underway, but it takes support in high-impact places to make that reform systemic and sustainable. The question that remains now is, will policy makers act on this before another decade passes?

The Burden Of An Enormously Bad Idea

Back in 2000, “No Child Left Behind” was the title of a snappy-phrased campaign booklet issued by Gov. George W. Bush issued as part of his campaign for the presidency. That same year, author Heather Mac Donald’s prescient new book hit the shelves and leapt to the national bestseller’s list.

The title of Mac Donald’s book was “The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society.” Were it written ten years after the passage of the gargantuan federal law known as No Child Left Behind, the book could well have made its point by referencing NCLB as its singular case study.

It wasn’t all President Bush’s fault. His campaign pamphlet was actually pretty good. As he proposed it, the Bush plan would have elevated accountability, guaranteed flexibility to the states and local districts, and expanded market-oriented school choice.

The latter two goals of the president’s plan were eviscerated before the NCLB proposal – H.R. 1 of 2001 – got its first committee hearing in the U.S. House. As a Member of the Congress at the time, and a member of the Education Committee, I was there to witness the wheels coming off the cart.

Despite our best attempts, the few of us on the committee who worked to protect the president’s lofty vision were summarily outvoted, amendment after amendment, as the president’s prudent campaign plan quickly morphed into what is today known as the largest federal intrusion into public schools in American history.

Bush signed the bill anyway – with glee and fanfare. Republicans championed its passage in both chambers. Education lobbyists and their government-worker clients were overjoyed with the promise of endless streams of federal cash.

Democrats got virtually all of their amendments into the new law and had, by far, the most to celebrate – much as remoras revel in a good shark attack. In NCLB, jubilant Democrats had achieved far more of their agenda to nationalize public education than they ever dreamed of when Bill Clinton was president.

Ten years later, there are few who deny NCLB has been a failure. Anyone who expected otherwise back in 2001 was either fooling himself, or more likely, didn’t read the law.

The law actually accomplished just what it was written to do – spend enormous sums of money the federal government didn’t have and hadn’t yet printed, provide perverse incentives for lower standards, and turn school administrators and teachers into dutiful federal bureaucrats instead of the productive local educators they had previously been free to be.

Today’s NCLB advocates, to the extent there are any, point to the value of “disaggregated data” and slightly higher NAEP test scores. These are indeed good things. However, in both cases, progress on these fronts was already well underway through state initiative.

In fact, the NAEP improvements measured since the passage of NCLB only follow trend lines that had preceded NCLB for about ten years. States serious about education reform, like Colorado, had already made progress on disaggregating performance data, closing achievement gaps and, more importantly, chartering a course to create more local competition in public education.

All of these efforts were working well in 2001. They were probably only stunted by NCLB.

Going forward, states should be allowed to opt out of NCLB. States that find value in the high, unfunded mandates of NCLB might be free to have them at their option.

For the rest of states, however – the ones that still aspire to higher achievement, competitive schools, professional educators and engaged parents – they should be free to escape the costly burden of the enormously bad idea we know today as NCLB.

As we close the books on the No Child Left Behind era, we are undoubtedly left with a mixed legacy, depending on one’s political and philosophical bents. But no matter your take on it, there’s no denying that NCLB has left a lasting mark in a few key areas – accountability (including focusing on achievement gaps), the use of research in the teaching process, and expanding options for families.

Accountability: For really the first time in our nation’s history, ESEA (as NCLB) made a major investment in accountability. Whether we like AYP or not, NCLB stands as a major stride forward to ensure that all students have access to a high quality education and that we are able to measure student achievement in a common way, regardless of race, family income, or zip code.

Unfortunately, the law failed to anticipate the all-too-uncommon practice of dropping standards in order to demonstrate adequate yearly progress. In recent years, we have heard far too many examples of this practice, an action that just short-changes the students and gives an inaccurate perception of student achievement. But the NCLB process exposed this problem, and now we must address it as we move forward on stronger accountability provisions.

At the heart of this accountability push was the measuring and closing of the achievement gap. Through this focus, NCLB was enormously successful in spotlighting the significant, persistent achievement gaps at the school, district, state and national level, gaps which had been ignored or papered over before. While NCLB helped us better measure and focus our attention on these gaps, recent NAEP results demonstrate that we have not been successful in closing them. On the whole, test scores have not risen significantly. The gaps between wealthy and low income, white and black, and white and Hispanic remain as large as they have been. There are examples of schools and districts that have made progress towards closing these gaps, but the fact remains that we simply have not succeeded in closing the gaps at scale.

Yes, we have seen some upticks with regard to raising scores in general. But those have been across the board. As we gain a point or two on the NAEP or see state test scores rise, those scores improve across demographics, leaving us with the same gaps we started the NCLB era with. As a result of NCLB, we have a far keener awareness of achievement gaps and a greater national commitment to addressing the problem. But we have not made the progress we sought in helping historically disadvantaged groups begin to catch up. This will be NCLB’s great unfinished legacy.

Effectively Using Research: By focusing on scientifically based research and calling for data-based decision making, NCLB began to take much of the guesswork out of school improvement and specific efforts to close those gaps. States and districts now demand to see evidence before they make changes. And funders – whether it be the federal government, corporate, or philanthropy – now expect to see proof both before and after investing in the latest improvement effort. That is nothing but a positive change and a change that has improved the quality of school improvement efforts across the nation. The question now before us is how we close the lag times between when good, useful research comes out and how it can be applied to the schools and classrooms that need it the most.

That said, the focus on scientifically based research has allowed for a bastardization of research and data in public education. There are still far too many decision makers who do not understand the difference between scientifically based research and the sort of squishy data that has long been peddled in public education. We have a growing distrust of data and statistics, fueled by misuse and mischaracterization of research. And we continue to hear that the most important measures are those we can’t measure.

Choice: Another strength of NCLB has been its expansion of flexibility and choice. Through the law, families across the nation have been empowered with the ability to choose not to send their child to a failing school. If enforced with fidelity, NCLB ensures that no child is sentenced to a failing school simply because of their zip code.

Coupled with a focus on research and data, NCLB has allowed communities to establish high-quality choices, mostly in the form of effective charter schools. As a result of the law, we have seen a greater emphasis on quality, accountability, and results in many of our charter schools, with kids across the country reaping the benefits. Despite ongoing efforts to push back on such flexibility and rein in the choices made available to families, the law has take significant steps forward to ensure all children should have access to a good public school.

At the end of the day, NCLB will best be remembered as an unfinished legacy, one with great promise, but real challenges in delivering on those promises. But we cannot deny that NCLB succeeded in moving K-12 education away from a discussion of process and inputs (as it had been for so many iterations of ESEA before it) and towards a focus on outcomes. We have started to see students and families as the customers in the process, with providers (the public school system) improving the quality of their product. And now, parents can look at test scores and other achievement measures to determine the return on investment for their local education dollar.

There is no greater measure of school effectiveness than student achievement. It is the ultimate outcome, and NCLB embraced that belief. Families were given the choice to transfer out of persistently low-performing schools and go to neighboring districts or newly created charter schools in their community. All in pursuit of improved learning and improved student performance. Can we improve our testing measures? Absolutely. And efforts are now underway toward this end. Were some accountability benchmarks clunky? Sure. But what matters is that NCLB put student performance front and center. The challenge now is how to improve the measures.

Ultimately, NCLB was not about testing, as critics would like to say. It was about student performance. It was about using scientifically based research to improve instruction and improve student learning. It was about expanded choice and improved teachers to improve student achievement. And it was about a clear measure of whether our schools are doing their jobs: ensuring our students succeed, as measured by common assessments. That is a strong legacy that we must now continue to build on.

The following is from Mike Petrilli, Fordham's executive vice president:

The federal law that everybody loves to hate turns ten today. Here’s what to think about it:

Happy birthday, No Child Left Behind. And here’s hoping that you don’t make it to eleven.

Ten years have passed since then president George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), making it the educational law of the land. A review of a decade of evidence demonstrates that NCLB has failed badly both in terms of its own goals and more broadly. It has neither significantly increased academic performance nor significantly reduced achievement gaps, even as measured by standardized exams.

In fact, because of its misguided reliance on one-size-fits-all testing, labeling and sanctioning schools, it has undermined many education reform efforts. Many schools, particularly those serving low-income students, have become little more than test-preparation programs.

It is time to acknowledge this failure and adopt a more effective course for the federal role in education. Policymakers must abandon their faith-based embrace of test-and-punish strategies and, instead, pursue proven alternatives to guide and support the nation’s neediest schools and students.

The data accumulated over 10 years make three things clear:

1) NCLB has severely damaged educational quality and equity, with its narrowing and limiting effects falling most severely on the poor.

2) NCLB failed to significantly increase average academic performance and significantly narrow achievement gaps.

3) Attempts to deal with NCLB’s severe shortcomings, such as the Obama administration’s waivers and the Senate Education Committee’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization bill, fail to address many of NCLB’s fundamental flaws and in some cases will intensify them. These proposals will extend a “lost decade for U.S. schools.”

Despite a decade’s worth of solid evidence documenting the failure of NCLB and similar high-stakes testing schemes, and despite mounting evidence from the United States and other nations about how to improve schools, policymakers cling to discredited models.

This is particularly tragic for families who hoped their children’s long wait for equal educational opportunity might be ending. It is also tragic for our public education system, whose reputation has been sullied by promises not kept and expensive intervention schemes that do more harm than good.

It is not too late to revisit the lessons of the past 10 years and construct a federal law that provides support for equity and progress in all public schools. With that goal in mind, FairTest has produced a report that, first, provides an overview of the evidence on NCLB’s track record.

Second, it looks at recent efforts at NCLB “reform” and what past evidence says about their likely outcomes.

Finally, it points to alternative strategies that could form the basis for a reauthorized federal law that would improve all schools, particularly those serving our most needy students.

Note: FairTest's report, "NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress:
What Can We Learn from this Policy Failure?" was written by Lisa Guisbond, with Monty Neill and Bob Schaeffer. The full report is available online here.

I think that too often we have looked at NCLB as though it lived a life unto itself and that we were all passive bystanders to its implementation. The success or failure of a law is not determined by the law itself but primarily by the actions of those who oversee it and of those who implement it.

Trite but true, context often matters more than Congress, and from my vantage point, as someone who has worked in many districts, schools, and classrooms, this is perhaps even more true with NCLB than it is with most other education legislation.

NCLB would have played out very differently—and much more positively, I think—had states, districts, schools, and teachers taken a different and more constructive tack in reacting to it.

I have worked with hundreds of schools under NCLB. I have never found the law to be oppressive or constraining WHEN (and I know it’s a big “when”) the people I was working with took rational action, using the best available information and resources, with the intent of meeting the law’s requirements.

Legislators, too, have played their part in NCLB’s challenges. Failing to modify the law through its scheduled reauthorization was, and continues to be, inexcusable and irresponsible in my opinion. This delay has also been a significant contributing factor in what appears to have become a collective national—and irrational—disdain for NCLB that has seemingly become stronger year after year.

At the same time, when I consider the years I worked in schools before NCLB and compare them with the years after, I note that the dialog I have now with my clients has changed dramatically and positively. Prior to NCLB, I got a lot of work, but nobody really cared what work I did. I got contracts; I executed them; I got paid. Rarely did anyone ask me to help raise student achievement, to help improve teaching practice, or to help school leaders make better decisions. Mostly, it was just about spending PD money left in school budgets and making sure teachers got continuing ed credits.

Since NCLB, however, I have been able to start every contract off with one simple question to my clients: “What learning goals do you have for your students?” In the pre-NCLB era, I asked this question many times, but it was often regarded as irrelevant or even impertinent. When I was just starting out, more cynical educators told me, “You just don’t get it. But you’re young, you’ll learn.”

Despite 16 years of experience, I guess I never learned because I have been able to ask the question as soon as any school or district called, and been able to engage immediately in a substantive discussion about measurable goals for student learning. Even if NCLB has contributed nothing more than this simple shift—away from the purpose of school being the delivery of curriculum and the warehousing of children to the furthering of student achievement—this contribution alone is not just historic, it’s a true paradigm shift, a radical reorientation completed in just a decade.

Looking for other legislation in American history that has had such a powerful effect, and that has permeated our entire nation so broadly and so quickly, only a few examples come to mind, most of them changes to the Constitution and rulings by the Supreme Court.

NCLB does not exist as a thing unto itself; it lives and breathes (or chokes and dies) differently at each school or district where I have worked. When I have worked with educators who support NCLB’s foundational premises, even if they have disagreed with the particulars, the law has worked well and we have achieved good results—without histrionics, without narrowing the curriculum, without threatening teachers and principals, without intimidating kids, and definitely without turning schools into test prep factories.

Simply put: the law has wroked as well as we have worked with it.

As I often tell the students I teach, “I can’t force you to come to school. I can’t force you to come to class, to pay attention, or to do your work. I can only provide you with inspiration, encouragement, and frequent high-quality opportunities to enrich your learning lives.”

That’s the truth of teaching and learning for me. And I think there’s truth as well in this idea when it comes to evaluating NCLB. The law didn’t make any of us do anything; we chose our own actions, and the extent to which we made choices that increased student achievement (espeically for the poor and minority kids at whom the law was targeted), the more we actualized NCLB's intent.

Though education is constitutionally mandated in every state, learning is not, and cannot be, regardless of any laws that exist now or that may exist in the future. After the pundits, policy wonks, and pols have done their work, success comes down to a small number of complex yet easy-to-identify decisions for the adults who care for kids and and who are tasked specifically with educating them. Make good choices, get good results. Isn’t that exactly the same message we tell our children? Could it be any less true for us as well?

NCLB was by no means optimal. But it was intended to be mended five years ago. In this sense, our federal legislators have let us down more than the law has. No law is ever perfect. But just as our national creed encourages us to continually strive to create not a perfect union but a more perfect union, so should we have striven to create a more perfect law. No fair evaluation of NCLB can be made without taking into account the degree to which it has been implemented.

We must also give full consideration to issues like the following:

• Many of the law’s most ire-inspiring aspects could have been mitigated by timely reauthorization.

• States could have be more transparent with their testing systems, more honest about their cut scores, more coherent with their standards, etc.

• Districts could have adopted more policies and practices to better manage teacher workload and increase student success.

• More principals could have stepped up much earlier and with much more force to be the instructional leaders they must be.

• Teachers could have chosen to use well-known effective practices rather persisting in the use of practices that were just as well-known to be ineffective.

Could we have done more to strengthen the social safety net in our country and thereby affect positively what is certainly the most important factor in the education of our children? Of course. But while this idea is both important and valid, it has little bearing on evaluations of NCLB. We must improve the social safety net for many reasons, not just education becuase doing so will benefit our society and our citizens educationally and in many other ways.

Considered without context, no legislation with paradigm-shifting implications like NCLB is going to receive good grades. But such an evaluation—even if it produced a straight-A report card—would be irrelevant. Legislation doesn’t live in a vacuum; it lives in a world full of diverse people who engage in a wide range of actions about it and an even wider range of reactions to it. Whether NCLB can be said to have succeeded or failed has more to do with how we followed it than how we wrote it.

I keep thinking of the old adage: You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it. Yes, measurement of education’s outcomes has its place; we can learn about students and schooling through tests. But what parents really want for their children are learning opportunities that are engaging, challenging, and supported. Few parents send their children to school hoping for day after day of exam-prep. Although NCLB included some elements that deserve praise, its downfall and its apparent legacy is an array of test-focused practices that are undermining the enriched learning opportunities our students deserve and need.

NCLB functions on the premise that what gets measured gets done – and educators have complied. Schools have squeezed out non-tested subjects (e.g., social studies, arts and music, and even science). NCLB has provided a clear disincentive to teach these other subjects.

Schools have similarly narrowed the teaching of knowledge and skills within the tested subjects. Working backwards from a given state’s test format and past test questions, teachers are now called upon to frame lessons around the specific items and perspectives that are likely to be tested. Broader understandings and deeper knowledge are both sacrificed to the goal of being able to answer a limited set of questions. This, again, reflects the clear incentives from NCLB.

Schools have devoted more and more time to teaching testing skills. Some teachers even refer to reading and writing tasks as a ‘genre’ for students to master. To be clear, I am speaking here of doing better on a test because one knows how to game it – not necessarily because one understands the material tested. NCLB has provided a clear incentive to spend considerable school time on test taking skills.

School districts have turned to additional products sold by testing companies to prepare students for their tests. A cottage industry of testing consultants has sprung up over the past decade, thanks to NCLB. Monies that should be spent in the classroom make their way into the pockets of those who prosper from testing.

One result of all this may in fact be slight increases in some test scores; since there is no true experiment set up, research results depend largely on how the researcher chooses the counter-factual (the comparison). I imagine many posts here throughout the week will attempt to trumpet those. But we need to ask whether such slight and fleeting increases should be the pre-eminent goal and also to ask what is being sacrificed to get there.

President Obama and Secretary Duncan have acknowledged some of the above-described problems and have criticized NCLB. Yet the tweaks to the law suggested by the administration and by many in Congress continue along the same testing-focused path. In fact, by pushing for policies that evaluate teachers based in large part on their students’ test scores, the administration is intensifying these problems.

The reason why Finland and its remarkable outcomes have become such a cause célèbre is simply because it stands as a prominent existence proof: it doesn’t have to be this way. We can as a nation work our way toward a system like Finland that focuses not on tests, but instead on creating great learning (and living) environments for our youth. When equity and opportunity are the guides, excellence follows.

(Read a longer version of this article at http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/06/in-defense-of-no-child-left-behind/#ixzz1isPjPnDo)

Bashing the No Child Left Behind Act has become so politically popular that it’s easy to forget how overwhelmingly bipartisan it was — the legislation passed the House with 384 votes and the Senate with 91. As the law marks its 10-year anniversary on Jan. 8, it’s important to look at both its successes and its failures. Did NCLB solve all of our public education problems? No. But it set a lot of good things in motion and was specifically designed to be revised after five or six years (in a reauthorization that has yet to happen and is unlikely to before this year’s election.) The No Child law didn’t get everything right the first time, but that’s the wrong yardstick. If we held other policy areas — think food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security — to the same standard No Child is held to these days, i.e., flawlessness, then we would have jettisoned those and many other worthy programs long ago.

No Child Left Behind was designed to bring accountability into public schools. It is not a new federal program. Rather, it is the latest modification to the mammoth Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the omnibus law that governs most federal involvement in public schools. The No Child revisions built on President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act, which built on the lessons learned during the Reagan years. As former governors, both Clinton and President George W. Bush shared a commitment to having specific standards for what skills children should be learning and holding schools accountable for teaching them. By the late 1990s, key organizations including the Education Trust and the Citizens Commission for Civil Rights were calling for stricter accountability measures, and Democrats on Capitol Hill — including California Representative George Miller, a key player on education policy in the House — were responding. When Bush became President and got recalcitrant Republicans to fall in line and support his accountability measures, it was a Nixon-to-China move on education policy.

Specifically, the law required states to test students in grades 3 through 8 — something fewer than 20 states were doing at the time — and to disaggregate the results by race, income, ethnicity and other characteristics to see how well all students were doing. States had to establish consequences for schools that failed to make progress, such as allowing students to transfer to other public schools, offering free tutoring after hours and changing schools’ instructional programs or their staffs.

The increased focus on accountability has produced some benefits. For starters, NCLB has changed educators from arguing about whether to hold schools accountable for performance to arguing about how to do it. That’s no small accomplishment in a field that is notoriously hostile to change and is particularly averse to the concept of consequential accountability. (It’s hard to overstate this; I’ve been in meetings where people have requested that words like “performance” not be used because they consider them offensive terms.) NCLB also produced an explosion of data that, while not consistently useful yet, is at least putting the education debate onto a more empirical footing. This change was long overdue as well. Elementary and secondary education is a $650 billion annual undertaking, but, until recently, even basic measures of — yes — performance were not routinely taken or analyzed.

Together, the focus on data and accountability is fueling a growing urgency about the need to improve our schools. The law highlighted the magnitude of the gaps in achievement and outcomes that divide students by race and income and makes it harder for people to argue, in essence, that “our schools are doing fine if you don’t count the poor and minority kids.” Oh, and by the way, there has been some improvement in achievement for low-income and minority kids, the law’s intended beneficiaries — which is no small thing in a country that systematically overlooks these students.

"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---"

So wrote Emily Dickinson, who could have been foreseeing the current debate around the legacy of NCLB on the occasion of its 10th anniversary.

I was among several people invited over at Education Week to share my thoughts on what ten years of life under NCLB has meant. As I read the responses and the discussions in other media, I found one constantly repeated point to be particularly irritating, resulting in my posting an angry tweet:

@askgeorge I am SO tired of folk claiming we didn't know 'bout ed inequality until NCLB. Shows how much Blk tchrs & parents were ignored. (@TeachMoore Jan 6)

Supposedly, NCLB’s one highly positive attribute is that, as Rep. Miller put it, “It turned the lights on in our schools.” He and others credit NCLB with uncovering what was supposedly a deeply hidden secret: That some groups of children in our country, particularly, Black, Hispanic, and special needs children, were generally getting far lower quality of education than their peers. That is the truth, but here’s the slant: It was not a secret. In fact, these inequalities are the results of long-standing, deliberate, systemic practices in American education. What’s more, parents and teachers, particularly minority parents, students, and teachers, had been complaining loudly and bitterly about those problems for a long, long, time. Perhaps it was policymakers who needed the evidence from NCLB, as Rep. Miller claims, to be “convinced that all children can learn and succeed.”

Miller and others argue that “we” didn’t have data on how each group of students was performing, and without that information, “no one felt the urgency to fix the problem.” Truthfully, what’s being preferred as data wasn’t that scarce; we have elementary school standardized test scores and college admission scores going back decades. The lack of urgency was because of whose children were being affected. NCLB supporters insist that the law provided impetus, in the form of real penalties, to correct these problems. In most cases, however, those pressures have been applied, not to the designers or perpetrators of the inequities, but more often to those who had been trying for so long to shine the light on these problems: students and teachers.

As I’ve shared before, many of the schools we currently label as failing, are in fact too successful at doing exactly what they were designed to do: under-serve specific groups of children. How can we hold every child and every school accountable for the same standards, while we simultaneously and deliberately give some students inferior resources, underprepared teachers, inadequate facilities, and put other unnecessary obstacles in their already difficult paths? It did not take ten years of humiliation and frustration of millions of children to learn what we already knew.

Real education reform starts with truth and equity.